Social Media

TidalTV Raises $15 Million Somehow for Something

TidalTV has raised $15 million on a wing and a prayer in their Series A from New Enterprise Associates and Valhalla Partners. There is no product, service, or even much of a website. In fact, the biggest thing they seem to have going for them is that their chairman was a co-founder of Advertising.com, and their CEO was an executive at Advertising.com as well.

We covered the funding announcement here a few days ago, but it keeps cropping up in my daily reads, so I've scraped together as many details as I can from the varying press releases and blog writeups, and here's what I've got so far:

* It won't be like Joost, it'll be like Hulu.* It won't be like Hulu, it'll be like Joost.* It is an embedded video website.* It has Flash in the architecture, somewhere.* There will be premium video content, and some exclusive content.* There will be UGC.* There won't be UGC.* There also might be a remote control you can use to watch stuff.

The most commonly agreed upon data-points seem to be the remote control, the premium content, and that there will be video on the service. So essentially, TidalTV seems to have raised $15 M on a couple resumes and a remote. Good work, if you can get it!

Here's the thing, though: it's pretty easy and formulaic to create embedded video websites, whether they have great premium content that's actually licensed, or if you hire a RentACoder to build an embedded site on an established domain you grabbed from SitePoint - it's going to get some traffic, and if you host it right, it'll make money. The question is will you be able to leverage that into something where you're able to sell direct in-stream advertisements that approach the level of payout that current content producers see with traditional mainstream outlets.

If their experience at Advertising.com allows them to do this, and they have the know-how to make it work aesthetically, we may have an actual breakout winner in the genre of online premium content. If not, we may have Yet Another Embedded Video Website.

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